Natural Wonders always in CS?

Is it just my luck/assumption or do the Natural Wonders almost always end up inside the borders of a CS? And unless I missed it, you DO get the benefit if you ally with that CS, correct?

I don't think you get the benefit if you ally. I sure wish there were more that spawned away from everyone... why should city states get all the fun?

exactly...and since you get such heavy penalties for conquering CS....You just have to hope you can pinch them with a general I suppose.

Or be Venice or Austria

Yeah, I really hate this particular fact also. It probably has to do with the way maps are created - I don't remember for sure, but my guess is NW are placed first, CS locations selected next, and because NW generally have large yields, it's very probably that locations around NW are deemed "fertile" enough for a CS to spawn there.

... just looked it up, and yes, I was correct. AssignStartingPlots.lua runs thing in this order:

I wonder if it would be possible to switch these two elements?

They don't always pop up in CS borders. I find that on standard settings, there's 5 NWs in the world, and usually 3 out of the 5 are found within 3 tiles of a CS.

I like the setup because City state "boundaries" are usually below par with cities that a player can build, and not just capitals, secondary cities as well. My secondary cities usually have, within 3 tiles, on average:
-3 or 4 luxury tiles total (usually 1 new lux and 3 redundant with the new lux or elsewhere in the empire),
-2 strategic resource tiles
-3 bonus resource tiles

4/2/3, vs. the usual start for CS: 1/2/2. The NW makes it a more reasonable to want to take the CS. I think the original intention of city-states was that you had to weigh the option of befriending them or just conquering them, but now it's a pretty straightforward.

DarthSheldonPhD said:

The NW makes it a more reasonable to want to take the CS. I think the original intention of city-states was that you had to weigh the option of befriending them or just conquering them, but now it's a pretty straightforward.

Click to expand...

I agreed with this up to the point where they changed warmonger system to make conquering city states all but impossible. Now it pretty much means that a natural wonder is lost if it resides with a city state.

kaspergm said:

I agreed with this up to the point where they changed warmonger system to make conquering city states all but impossible. Now it pretty much means that a natural wonder is lost if it resides with a city state.

Click to expand...

Often, but not always. I've had several starts where I discovered a good natural wonder close to a nearby CS, and by reprioritizing everything I got a settler out there toute suite & claimed the wonder before the CS could. In those games my second city was often in kind of a weird location, but that's a small price to pay to claim a wonder like the Mines of Solomon or the Fountain of Youth.

But yeah... most of the time the Natural Wonder is just lost to you unless you're able to steal it with a Great General.

I routinely decrease the # of CSs using Advanced game setup because I find it ridiculous how many there are by default. A standard game may have 16-18 CSs, I would knock that down to 5 or so.

As a result, natural wonders are rarely in CS borders in my games.

Another reason the communitas map is my favorite. Natural Wonders in Useful locations!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=501140

It seems if you can get to the Wonder soon enough it may not yet be in within the CS...not always the situation though. [Also if it all makes sense and you're quick enough, you can grab both the wonder and the CS's luxury item....but the luxury item will usually go before the CS grabs the Wonder...so you usually have to be fast and maybe take risks sending a settler out alone....]

Most disappointing is, while playing as Spain, being the first to find the Reef, finding it still available, but then realizing some CS is positioned such that there is no way you can squeeze a city in there and grab it...


Kind of a "Good news; Bad news" story...."Here's 1000G for finding it....but don't for a second think we're going to let you use it in this game to be able to beat up on the AI..."

Not so much, with my 2nd city I claimed Mt. Kilamanjaro NW. Then later with my 4th city, I claimed Mt. Fuji, mainly because I needed the spot for coal. Mt. Kilamanjao is so far my favorite NW!

thegingerninja said:

Or be Venice or Austria

Click to expand...

This is a case where being Austria is better. As Austria you can annex the city (removing the cultural penalty expansion rate of puppets and then buy the tile.)

As Venice, you could have a natural wonder just outside your cultural boundary for a very long time. In addition, if the natural wonder doesn't include either gold or food, your puppet governor may decline to work the tile even after your borders expand to take it in.